Fred Kovaleski
Star US tennis player who worked undercover for the CIA
FRED KOVALESKI, who has died aged 93, was a noted American tennis player in the 1950s, when he reached the last 16 at Wimbledon and the French and US Opens; in a twist that would be implausible even in a Hollywood film, he was at the time secretly an officer with the CIA who used the sport as cover for espionage.
His runs at Paris and in London came in 1950, the same year he reached the final of the US National Indoor Tennis Championships. Then, while in Egypt, he was approached by an embassy official who asked him what he intended to do when he stopped playing tennis.
The sport was strictly amateur – in other words unpaid – and Kovaleski was already 27. It became clear that he was being recruited by the CIA, who saw his travelling lifestyle as ideal cover. Kovaleski also spoke fluent Russian and Polish.
After training in spycraft in Virginia, during which he came within a few points of the US Open quarter-finals, he resumed his career on the tennis circuit. In 1954 he was ordered to help debrief a tennis-loving KGB defector, Yuri Rastvorov, who identified thousands of Russian agents to the CIA.
As revealed in 2006 by Kovaleski’s son Serge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Kovaleski’s tasks were not confined to knocking up with Rastvorov on a court at a safe house in Maryland. He also had to supply him with prostitutes – the defector had left his wife behind in Moscow – and take him out drinking. When they were involved in a car accident, Rastvorov had to hide in bushes beside the road in case the police asked for his non-existent identification.
While based in Cairo, Kovaleski tapped telephone lines and arranged the exfiltration of another defector. But the CIA deemed his marriage there in 1957 to Manya Jabes, whose father was Russian, a security risk and he resigned – though she later worked for the agency, translating intercepts.
Kovaleski last competed at the US Open in 1966. By then, one of the most popular television shows was I Spy, with Robert Culp (alongside Bill Cosby) as a tennis player who is really a spy. Kovaleski always denied any connection.
Frederick Thomas Kovaleski was born at Maynard, Massachusetts, on October 8 1924. His parents were Polish immigrants – his father worked in a car factory – and he grew up at Hamtramck, Michigan, a town that was largely populated by Poles.
When he was 11, he won a handball tournament at school. A teacher wellknown locally as a tennis coach, Jean Hoxie – who later gave lessons to Jackie Kennedy – suggested he take up the sport, but Fred’s father had never heard of tennis and balked at the $10 cost of a racket.
So Jean Hoxie bought him one and he began practising hitting a ball back against a wall. (The record for doing so without missing was 1,775 times, held by another Hoxie protégée, Peaches Bartkowicz, who won the Wimbledon girls’ singles.) By 17, Fred was on the US junior Davis Cup team.
Jean Hoxie helped him gain a tennis scholarship to the College of William & Mary, Virginia. His studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served as a paratrooper and liberated prison camps in the Philippines. After the war, he was a star player when the college tennis team twice won the national championships. He would go on to win five international tournaments.
After his time with the CIA, Kovaleski went on to forge a successful career in business working in countries such as Sudan, South Africa and Australia for Pepsi, Revlon and Nabisco. He continued to play tennis until he was 92 and was ranked the No 1 player in the world among those over 85; his secret, he claimed, was that he trained with 65-year-olds.
His wife died in 2014. Their son survives him.
Fred Kovaleski, born October 8 1924, died May 25 2018